


there ain't nothin' for me out here

by IvyPrincess



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Late Night Conversations, Other, knife shoes appreciation society
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 17:20:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16769509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IvyPrincess/pseuds/IvyPrincess
Summary: Closure is playing hard to get, and Yuzuru is having none of it.





	there ain't nothin' for me out here

Yuzuru jiggled his key into the lock, leaning his whole weight onto the door like his mother told him not to. It wasn’t jammed, but he was tired, it had just started raining, the packages he ordered online were heavy even if they weren’t bulky, and he just wanted to collapse somewhere soft already. Finally, the door opened, and he squeezed his way into the apartment, pushing the door back shut with a foot and stumble-hopping over a stray shoe to drop the boxes with a jarring thud into the closet. Yuzuru rested his forearm on the closest patch of wall to toe his damp sneakers off and then shuffle into a pair of slippers, knowing that if he let himself sit down now, he wouldn’t be getting back up again anytime soon. He was looking forward to collapsing face down on the couch or even the floor if he didn’t make it that far, but tea sounded just as nice on such a dismal day. Sighing as he made his way from the kitchen after putting water on to boil, Yuzuru trailed his fingers along the wall absentmindedly as he walked into his living room before stopping abruptly.

He had expected the tightly shut blinds, he had expected the turned off lights, he had even expected the dirty laundry in the basket by the TV (a shame it wouldn’t fold itself), but he hadn’t expected the set of familiar shoulders straining under a sharp black suit jacket, the wool shifting like paint in water into the darkness of Yuzuru’s apartment if not for the meager light gleaming weakly from the entryway.

“Javier,” he whispered, watching those barely visible shoulders tense at the sound of his name. Because this stranger that he hadn’t seen in over a year was Javier now, not Javi.

Desperate to do something to resist the urge to touch him one last time, Yuzuru stepped silently around the sofa and yanked the blinds up with force he didn’t know he had through numb fingertips, inviting moonlight and mirrored patches of city nightlife in to creep across the coffee table and entwine softly with the warm lighting from the door. He stayed there by the floor-to-ceiling windows, quietly observing the artificial starlight of Toronto’s skyscrapers at midnight in an effort to ignore the trembling urge to turn his head back and stare unrelentingly at the stranger sitting in his living room. Instead, Yuzuru examined him through the reflection on the glass, the blue of the night tinting his own skin even paler than usual. Javier was slouched forward, elbows resting on his spread knees and head bent down over his clasped hands, his facial expression hidden, looking every bit the fallen angel Yuzuru had sinned for. Yuzuru stared at his ebony curls, remembering a time when his fingers, not just his reflected gaze, had had the right to run through them.

“I asked Marina to marry me.” Javier’s voice was rough from disuse and a whisper-thin needle of heartbreak, slipping through Yuzuru’s inner musings straight down the tautness of his spine. It had been years, but his pride still stung from the evidence that Javier had managed to move on, even if his heart didn’t waver now. He forced a smile onto his face, hoping it would pass muster in the dark of the room as he turned around.

“Congratula-”

“She said no.” Yuzuru froze half-turned, insincerely polite smile dripping off his face with the rain on the windows. With the amount of emotion he truly felt (that is to say, none), he spoke again.

“Why are you here.” His voice, flat as the gleaming pavement, offered a demand, not a question.

“She didn’t even say to wait, or to have this conversation later, she just...said no.” Eyes glazed over and staring absentmindedly into abstract pools of light on the glass table in front of him, Javier didn’t seem to have heard him at all, the crack in his voice belying the deeper emotion trying to escape.

“So why are you here?” Yuzuru tried again, but he was trapped in the blue reflection of his glass window, and Javier, on the other side, both close enough to touch and worlds apart, couldn’t hear him.

“Dating for a year was long enough, right?” Javier muttered slowly, almost to himself, dragging his head up slowly to break blackened layers of grieving waters, his eyes finally meeting Yuzuru’s gaze. His eyes were soothing brown no longer, dark but for the reflected light from outside, an ill-suited glimmer fighting against the yawning abyss of his desperation.

Yuzuru couldn’t look away.

“I did everything: I got blue roses, made all her favorite foods, we had candles and music… everything she likes, everything to impress her.” Javier was a dying man, pleading to a distant god with his last breath.

Yuzuru turned away. What god was he, what could he do?

“It’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Toronto,” he murmured. He was not who Javier should pray to.

“Why didn’t she say yes? I thought she was happy.” His voice cracked on his last word, the voice of a man who had no tears left to give away. Yuzuru watched the reflection of his past’s clasped hands tightening.

“We haven’t seen each other in months.”

“Didn’t she love me back?” They were a mockery of a duet, performing intertwining soliloquies that neither paid attention to.

“Javi,” Yuzuru snapped, losing his patience and turning around to face his reality again. (He refused to acknowledge the flickering thread of excitement from the ease of a familiar word.) “Why are you here.” The chill seeping through his shirt as he leaned back on the glass wove through his ribcage, winding casually around his sternum to rest on a tightening throb. He could almost blame it for how cold his heart felt.

Javier looked up again, eyes sharpening into focus on Yuzuru’s face. For the first time since he had set foot in his apartment tonight, Javier saw _him_ when their eyes met, not the woman that had driven him to Toronto. The attention draped over Yuzuru like a cape, one he hadn’t worn in years. The familiar weight settled over his shoulders, straightening his spine and reminding him of who he had been, who he still was.

Javier shrugged, his eyes shifting rightwards, breaking their hold on Yuzuru ( _again_ , he didn’t think), to the blank TV projecting memories into his mind. “You’re the only one that doesn’t remind me of her… you never even met her.”

“You flew halfway across the world.” _You can’t do that. Not for me. Never for me._

Javier continued like he didn’t know his former lover well enough to understand what Yuzuru hadn’t said out loud. “She even met Brian, but never you.” He shrugged again with that small, casually defensive gesture, like the only thing still keeping him in one piece was pretending that it didn’t affect him, that it didn’t matter. Yuzuru was reminded of a much younger man, the same shoulders instinctively hunching inwards as he talked about his time under Morozov. His hands itched to console Javier’s superimposed past self somehow, but he didn’t know where the line he couldn’t cross was, didn’t know where platonic commiseration ended and mistakes began. It was easier to keep up a mockery of a friendship when they were worlds apart, a mirror of the pretense Javier hunkered down behind, shallow texts about everything and nothing important flitting between city skylines and skimming the depth of a hole an indelible bond ached to fill.

“...I thought you didn’t want us to meet, so I never asked.” Yuzuru wasn’t even sure if he himself wanted to meet the woman who gained everything that used to be his. Would he look into the face of everything she had to see everything he had lacked? As much as he disliked what she represented, Marina didn’t deserve any misplaced antagonism.

“I didn’t. You’re both so different, and I didn’t want to compare you,” Javier replied absently, mind still distant, but the chill in Yuzuru’s chest eased a bit nonetheless. He wondered if, to this day, Javier knew how the instinctive kindness he freely exuded was what drew Yuzuru to him like a moth to flickering flame, yearning for a soothing spark that would inevitably destroy him. It wasn’t fair that Yuzuru could still see in him everything that he had fallen in love with and even less fair that he couldn’t get to have it all again.

“Then why are you here now?” Yuzuru repeated. He wouldn’t let his thoughts flicker down that path again.

Javier shrank into himself, bursting heart attempting to squeeze into a cramped confessional as he glanced down towards the coffee table again, unable to meet Yuzuru’s gaze, coldly neutral as it was. “Because every second I walked down the street in Madrid, I was reminded of her… I needed to escape.”

“And your first instinct was to escape to me?” Yuzuru’s pride fought his common sense over control of his emotions, and he smothered the sense of uneasy smugness he felt.

That cynical smirk, a sham of his normal bright grin, had no place on Javier’s face. “Toronto’s always been a second home, hasn’t it?”

Yuzuru suppressed his flinch at the bitterness in his voice. Toronto wasn’t the only home that Javier had left for Marina, and they both knew it.

“...I’m sorry she said no.” He turned away again.

“No, you’re not,” Javier scoffed. “You’re never sorry for anything you don’t absolutely have to be sorry for.” His voice, as derisive as he meant for it to be, nonetheless carried a teasing echo, resonating with affectionate jibes they’d volleyed in the past.

Yuzuru hunched his shoulders against the overwhelming nostalgia, sure that he was the only one who still felt any sort of wistfulness for the past, as much as he tried to tamp it down. “...My condolences regardless.”

Javier sighed, receding back into his despair, and they were back to their original positions, as if nothing had changed. Truly, nothing _had_ changed. “Why didn’t she say yes?”

“Why were you so sure she would?” Yuzuru retorted with a hint of bitterness.

Javier didn't notice. “Because… I thought she loved me. Our relationship was perfect, and--”

“That doesn’t mean she would’ve said yes,” Yuzuru interrupted, turning back around once again, an opportunity to argue with Javier irresistible when he was already so conflicted.

“I tried so hard to be the perfect boyfriend though,” Javier defended himself, raising his baleful stare to level against his former lover again, and Yuzuru would have been grateful he had so pettily wanted that weighty gaze on him again if his mind hadn’t already formulated a response.

“You learned from your mistakes, didn't you,” he scoffed, pushing off the window and stalking into the kitchen as the kettle shrieked its tinny lungs out. Javier’s quiet reply was almost drowned out by the rustling of the tea leaves he shook out into a mug.

“I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.” Yuzuru eyed the way his interloper’s suit jacket drew taut across those hunched shoulders, tamping down the almost-malicious pleasure at the emotional power he held over the man as the water trickling into his mug mirrored the rain dripping down the windows outside.

He picked his way carefully back into his living room, sinking down into an armchair next to his past, close enough for comfort, far enough for self-control. Sleeve-covered hands wrapped around his entirely-too-hot mug, and the warmth from the steam and Javier’s apology softened his voice. “I know. I know.”

Yuzuru watched the knuckles on Javier’s clenched hands whiten and release. “Am I just… incapable of being loved?” The Spaniard spoke, voice cracking in the middle. And yet, he still did not look at him.

“Why would you think that?” Yuzuru asked in response, knowing exactly why.

“She doesn’t love me.” Yuzuru’s fingers pressed harder against his mug from the finality in Javier’s voice, and he wondered if the physical pain from the heat was anything close to how his ex-lover was feeling at the moment.

“It doesn’t matter how perfect you were, how perfect both of you together were. In the end, it’s her choice.” There was a time that Yuzuru had thought he had it all, too. The sport, the competition, the lover: all had been conquered, and yet it hadn’t lasted. Happily ever after wasn’t obligated to happen in real life, he reflected, and there are no mere side characters in reality. Javier deserved to have his own story, to be more than just an extraneous addition to his biography. And so, they had separated. And so, they had moved on.

“She didn't want me like I wanted her,” Javier scoffed bitterly.

There was no false comfort Yuzuru could have added, and so he drew his feet up beneath him and said nothing.

“First it was you, and now her-” Javier broke off. “I’m sorry.”

Yuzuru reached forward to set his tea down, before leaning back and facing Javier fully. “We… both made mistakes. I thought we settled this.” It truly had been a shared blame.

Javier sighed. “Yeah, we did, I’m just… Love is like-”

“What you’re better than me at, right?” Yuzuru interjected with a rueful shake of his head. He understood, he supposed.

“...I wasn’t going to put it like that, but yes.” Javier shrugged again, but there was something more open about the gesture now, the remnants of discontent having dissipated with the tension of the past few minutes.

Yuzuru mockingly shrugged along with him. “You liked being better than me at something,” he concluded. It didn't offend him like he thought it would have. Javier had always been a soft spot.

Javier chuckled, more genuinely than before. “Doesn’t everyone? You’re so… you…” He gestured at Yuzuru helplessly, the awe in his eyes reminiscent of so many shared years not hidden entirely. “Let’s not rehash old arguments.”

Yuzuru hid a small smile, the nostalgia of their interactions coloring his reply. “It was hard finding out love could go wrong for you, too, wasn’t it?” He half-teased. Yuzuru figured their shared memories had lifted Javier’s mood enough for him to say something like that, and the possessiveness he had always been unwilling to suppress heartily agreed. Of course Javier should focus on him.

Javier lowered his head again, huffing out a short laugh. “Yeah, yeah, make fun of me all you want, I know it was my fault, alright?”

Yuzuru smirked. “You were forgiven a long time ago.”

“I was?” Javier turned to fully face Yuzuru again, playful affection sparkling minutely in his eyes.

Yuzuru shrugged smugly, pleased that he had distracted Javier out of his misery. “I knew what you would be like.”

Javier’s eyes dimmed slightly as he studied Yuzuru’s face for something Yuzuru wasn’t sure he had. “Yuzu. Do you… still love me?”

The man in question stiffened.

Javier looked down again. “I’m… sorry. That’s not something I have the right to ask anymore.”

“I… do still love you,” Yuzuru replied haltingly. “But… not like that anymore.” And as he spoke, he felt something settle in his heart, something that told him he spoke the truth, a small fluttering something that he hadn’t known he possessed.

“...Ah.” Javier shifted uneasily. “I… think I still love you. In the way that you don’t anymore.” His eyes darted back towards Yuzuru’s impassive face, almost beseechingly, and even in the dark, Yuzuru could tell he was flushing.

“You don’t,” Yuzuru shot back, with a finality he had only just discovered.

Javier frowned. “How do you know?” _Are you sure you don’t love me back?_

“Because we’re over. We’ve been over for 2 years.” _Because you’re here right now,_ Yuzuru didn't say. _Because pride was the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of our bond. Because if you truly loved me like you think you do, you wouldn’t be sitting here baring your insecurities to me._

“Yuzu-” Javier protested.

“No.” And he could feel the chill returning, similar but different from before. “You don’t get to do this.”

“I…” Javier sighed, seeming to shrink as his breath left in his exhale. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I had to try.”

“And you had to know I would refuse.” Yuzuru smiled sadly, back stiff with the brittleness of feelings left unsaid.

“...Yes.” Javier gave a humorless laugh, a stark contrast to the glimmering personality he had almost regained such a short time before. “No wonder she rejected me,” he continued derisively, lowering his head and turning away to regard something only he could see.

Yuzuru stayed quiet. It wasn’t his place to assuage Javier’s ego; that confidence had to come from inside, not from an outsider. _He_ was the interloper now, with no right to attempt to salvage another’s broken relationship. Some part of him, a deeply hidden, ugly part, wondered if he even wanted them to reconcile. Swallowing his bitter feelings (for the last time, he swore), Yuzuru took pity on the man he knew better than any other. “You need a place to stay tonight?”

Javier shook his still-bowed head. “I didn't want to impose. I have a room at the hotel.”

“Ah.” Yuzuru blinked, mildly surprised.

Something must have been obvious in his tone. Javier glanced up. “It… wouldn’t be fair to you anyways.” For him to have been this considerate even in his struggle… again, Yuzuru marveled at the easy compassion Javier exuded before he continued, “But… let me stay for a little bit longer?” The extended olive branch was a silent plea in Javier’s eyes.

“Always.” He hadn’t realized how much he had missed this warm presence in his life, and even more so now that the copper tang of strained regrets had been washed away, maybe not entirely, but enough for a new perspective. Yuzuru smirked. “Old men need to take breaks more often anyways, yes?”

Javier barked out a rough laugh, tinged with relief. “I never told you, did I?”

Yuzuru grinned sincerely for the first time, continuing to tease. “That you still love me? You already did.”

“Very funny,” Javier dipped his head again, his shoulders relaxing. “I just… thank you, Yuzu. For this. For the past. For everything.”

Yuzuru’s smile gentled, the slyness slipping quietly away as the sound of rain crested again. “Anytime.” He reached forward again for his tea, which had cooled to a comfortable temperature, curling his knees up to his chest as he took his first sip.

They turn at the same time to gaze out the rain-glazed windows, watching the blur of street lights flicker through the wetly rhythmic pitter-patter of time moving on tirelessly, endlessly. The city goes on, as it always has.

**Author's Note:**

> The song this was inspired by (Chilly by NIKI) very quickly burrowed its way into my heart and refused to let go. It’s about what really happens after love is over, when lovers try to revert to friends (not that everything could be the same again after learning such intimate things about someone else), and I wanted to try portraying something that was neither truly happy or sad, just something a little wistful, something that truly was. Love without a happily ever after doesn’t necessarily have to end in tragedy, and it doesn’t even have to have an ending at all. It’s been a bit of a struggle to write; I drew from my own experiences and had to do quite a bit of soul-searching, but I’m happy with what’s finally come out. A huge thank you to Justine, Cath, Claire, and all the other KSAS girls who proofread for me.


End file.
